¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Raycast:

Your shortcut to everything.

A collection of powerful productivity tools all within an extendable launcher. Fast, ergonomic and reliable.

It’s for macOS only. I originally heard of it via DHH.

One of its features I like is snippets:

Write faster by using snippets to store and insert frequently used text. Expand them automatically with a keyword.

Use the Create Snippet command to store a new snippet. If you specify a keyword, you can simply type it in any application to have it auto-expand in-place.

Snippets are handy for frequently used text such as canned email responses, code or emojis.

For example, I can assign a @@fzf shortcut so that it expands to

[[ -f /usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/key-bindings.bash ]] && source /usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/key-bindings.bash

…which is quicker than (i) typing it out, (ii) retrieving it from a wiki and/or second brain app.

Having text macros like these is handy whenever you do not have full control over the environment. If you happen to have control, you could always create a shell alias and/or a Makefile target for ergonomics and discoverability.

These expansions can happen anywhere: terminal emulator, web browser, email client, LLM prompt.

A follow-up feature I am interested in exploring is the ability to export snippets from Raycast to a location within version control, such as dotfiles. It would be perfect if I could manage them all via text in an easy to edit format such as YAML.

Another snippet example: @@gca expands to:

EDITOR=vim git commit --author="Thiago Perrotta <{my-corp-email}>"

I chose @@ because that’s a chord I am unlikely to type.